10 comments:

As you probably know, Curtis, these things were pretty popular until it dawned on people they were being manipulated, and that the appearance of the dead in the photos was a hoax, calculated, much like table tapping, to play upon people's sense of loss and longing for those gone. And of course upon people's gullibility. But while it lasted, good American business, gulling and being gulled, a sucker born every minute, Mundus vult decipi & c.

Of course the wispy spirits of the dear departed of the nineteenth century and the ghosts of the Luftwaffe in the sky over Rotterdam in the millennial non-spirit photograph are distinct (non-) entities.

BTW, Curtis, in the comment chain on that post to which I've just given a link, there's a bit about William H. Mumler, the inventor of spirit photography. (He discovered the process accidentally by coming up with an interesting double exposure.)

Thank you. I will pursue this with great interest. My favorite "near" or "pseudo" spirit photograph, which I think about quite often, is a picture taken by the 19th century French photographer Arthur Batut of his son, which Penguin Books used as the cover illustration for its edition of Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Tales. Batut, who I read is considered to be the father of aerial photography, was fooling around (apparently for expressive purposes) with double-exposure images and he achieved a haunting photograph, which Penguin adapted quite effectively for the cover of the Stevenson collection. I will always have a sentinmental attachment to the Batut image and the Stevenson story because (among other things) it was the first real work of literature that moved my daughter Jane. In school, they tend to assign her flat, didactic, obvious books. In Dr. Jekyll, she gasped at the "gasp" places, felt the characters' feelings and saw London streets she had already seen as they were over a century ago. I think that was a fine spirit perception.

For me the image on the post was moving because it re-created (or created) a sensation of watching the searchlight beams seeking out German bombers in the night sky -- an experience which of course I never had, though in the nights of my WW II era childhood such images often haunted.